Well, Verizon has confirmed to us that July 9th is, in fact, the date that the carrier expects to start shipping the Galaxy S III. It did not say whether or not it would ship before that, only that that was its expected shipping date.

This is a little bit confusing considering the fact that the pre-order period for the phone starts today and Verizon’s competitors, Sprint and T-Mobile, will be getting the phone out on June 21st.

AT&T, for its part, has yet to announce a release date and U.S. Cellular won’t be launching the phone until the month of July.

It’s also not clear as to how this might affect pre-orders at third party retailers like Best Buy where, according to Droid-Life, customers are being told that the device is expected to ship by June 28th.

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Clearly, this is not the news that many future Galaxy S III owners wanted to hear. A launch six weeks after a pre-order period is not an ideal situation, especially when the device will have launched on other carriers prior to that.

So, it looks like Galaxy S III owners have a pretty big choice to make. Pre-order and wait or wait to pre-order and weigh the many options that are on the table.

Anyone going to be skipping out on a pre-order because of this? Or, worse yet (for Verizon) buying the Galaxy S III on another mobile carrier?